CHAPTER 6 #2
She wasn't asleep. She was in the tea room, cross-legged on the red floor cushion, the Rilke paperback open in her lap, one of Riko's blankets around her shoulders.
The single lamp by the engawa corridor threw her shadow long across the tatami.
On the low table beside her sat the chipped kintsugi bowl, its gold seams catching what little light there was.
The room smelled faintly of tea she had made hours ago and let cool, and beneath it of the yuzu peel Riko kept working into everything, as though warmth could season a house if applied with enough patience. Riko had understood that far longer than Kenji had.
He hung his jacket in the entryway instead of leaving it over his arm, which was its own kind of decision. He rolled his cuffs back one turn. He crossed the room and sat, one arm's length from her, on the tatami. Close enough. Not closer.
Neither of them spoke at first. He'd learned this past week that silence with her wasn't the silence he kept with other people. With her it had a shape. It filled up with something instead of emptying out.
“You came back safe,” she said finally.
“As requested,” he said.
She almost smiled. He watched the almost, the small movement at the corner of her mouth, the way it started and then reconsidered itself, and filed it away with the rest of the things about her he was keeping, unasked, in a place he didn't examine too closely.
“Was it bad?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Only tedious. A young man who mistook volume for leverage.”
“Did you shout back?”
“I have never once shouted in my life.”
She studied him like she believed that completely, which was, he thought, probably the most unsettling compliment anyone had ever paid him.
“How did you know I could speak Japanese?” she asked. “You never asked me. In the elevator, that first night, you just knew.”
He considered the question the way he considered most things, fully, before he answered it.
“I read your published translations. There is a paper on consent forms for a juvenile leukemia trial, three years old now. Your syntax is careful. You choose the small true word over the impressive one, every time there is a choice.” He paused. “You are a fine translator.”
She stared at him long enough that he wondered if he'd said something wrong. He didn't think he had. He was rarely right about that lately, though he was only learning this because of her.
“You read my work,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
“Before or after Boston?”
“Before.” He held her eyes. “Two months before.”
She sat with that. He let her sit with it. He'd found, this week, that the things worth saying to her were the things he only needed to say once.
“Why me?” she said finally, in English, quiet enough that he almost lost it under the sound of the building settling around them. “Really.”
He was quiet a moment, not because he lacked the answer, but because he'd never once said it aloud, not even alone, and there was a difference between knowing a thing and hearing his own voice confirm it was true.
“Because I saw your name on a research paper in a stack of files on my desk, and I could not stop reading it,” he said.
“Because when I saw the same name on a collateral clause several weeks later, I told Daisuke I would go for you myself.
Because I would not have another man's hands on you. That is your answer. There is nothing else underneath it.”
She let out a breath slowly, like she'd been holding it since before he started talking. She looked down at her hands, at the small jade ring on her right hand, and turned it once around her finger.
He'd seen her hands do that before, small and quick, whenever something in her chest was working itself loose. He didn't know yet what her mother's ring meant to her, only that it did. He wanted, someday, to be told.
“You do not have to answer that,” he said, quieter. “But do you understand what I have just told you?”
She was quiet another moment. Then, in Japanese, barely more than breath: “Hai. Wakarimasu.”
Yes. I understand.
He nodded. He wanted, badly, to close the small distance between them and put his hand over hers where it rested against the jade ring, and he didn't, because she hadn't asked him to, and because everything he was building with her depended on this one rule holding: that he never took a single thing she hadn't offered first.
He rose instead.
“Naomi.” Just her name, quiet, so she'd look up before he said the rest.
She did.
There were other words waiting behind his teeth. He didn't let them out. Not tonight.
“Oyasuminasai,” he said. Good night.
For a moment he thought she might ask him to stay, and some undisciplined part of him hoped she would.
She didn't. She only said, “Good night,” and went back to her book, and he made himself walk to his own room instead of standing in the doorway a moment longer than a man with any discipline left ought to stand there.
His own room was dark except for the wash of city light through the window. Tokyo never really went dark at night, just quieter, a field of small gold points stretching all the way to the bay. He stood at the glass a while without turning on a lamp.
He undid his cuffs. He set his jacket over the back of the chair instead of hanging it properly, which he never did, which told him something about the state he was in that he didn't especially want to examine.
He looked down at his left wrist. The Grand Seiko caught what light there was along its case, the way it had for fourteen years, since his father pressed it into his hand and said almost nothing else, because by then there had been almost nothing else left worth saying between them.
He hadn't taken it off at night once in six years.
He unclasped it now, with his right hand, careful, and set it down on the dresser.
The room felt strange without its weight at his wrist. His father had never been a warm man.
He'd been exact, though, and in that house, exactness had counted as its own kind of love, if a boy knew how to read it.
Kenji pressed his thumb into the healed end of his shortened little finger instead, the small habit he'd built for himself at twenty-two and never outgrown, and closed his eyes.
He said a name into the dark.
Not Aoi.
Naomi.
He said it again, quieter the second time, the way a man tests a bridge with one foot before he trusts it with the rest of him. The room didn't answer. He hadn't expected it to.
Something shifted beneath his ribs anyway, an old locked room he had not checked in years, and this time he let it remain open.
He thought of the notebook again: two words in her hand that he had read without permission and had not been able to stop thinking about since.
He had told himself all evening it could wait.
It wasn't going to wait much longer. He gave himself until tomorrow, and no longer than that.